Has U.S. Democracy Been Trumped?

[johnu]

Mission Accomplished

 

Iran Ends Nuclear Limits as Killing of Iranian General Upends Mideast

On Sunday, the Iranian government said it was abandoning its “final limitations in the nuclear deal,” the international agreement intended to prevent Tehran from developing nuclear weapons. The decision leaves no restrictions on Iran’s nuclear program, the statement said, including on uranium enrichment, production, research and expansion.

 

Iran will, however, continue its cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency and return to the nuclear deal if the economic sanctions imposed on it are removed and Iran’s interests guaranteed, the government said. American sanctions have hit Iran’s oil-based economy particularly hard.

If the goal was to prod Iran into rapidly completing nuclear weapons, mission accomplished.

 

Iraqi Parliament Votes To Expel Foreign Troops After Soleimani Killing

Iraq’s parliament voted to demand the withdrawal of foreign troops from the country on Sunday following U.S. President Donald Trump’s order to assassinate a high-profile Iranian military leader there.

 

The vote came after Prime Minister Adel Abdul Mahdi advised parliament to expel the troops in response to the attack Trump authorized last week on Iranian Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani while the commander was at Baghdad International Airport in Iraq.

If the goal was to concede US influence in Iraq, mission accomplished.

 

Twitter Critics Explode Over Trump’s Threatened ‘War Crimes’ In Iran

{Trump Twitter feed} - targeted 52 Iranian sites (representing the 52 American hostages taken by Iran many years ago), some at a very high level & important to Iran & the Iranian culture

Rebutted by many including former special counsel in the Department of Defense Ryan Goodman

WAR CRIME

 

"Making the clearly-recognized historic monuments, works of art or places of worship which constitute the cultural or spiritual heritage of peoples ... the object of attack"

 

Geneva Convention Protocol I

(also: U.S. Department of Defense, Law of War Manual, 5.18)

So targeting cultural and religious sites is a war crime under the Geneva Convention? Who would have known B-) If the goal was to make President Impeached a war criminal, mission approaching completion.

[y66]

From Jonathan Bernstein at Bloomberg:

 

I don’t know why President Donald Trump decided to kill the Iranian General Qassem Soleimani. Perhaps he was rolled by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and others; perhaps it was just impulsive.

 

But I can say that if Trump is seeking a confrontation to help him win re-election, he’s almost certainly making a big mistake.

 

I went through all of this back in the spring, and Michael Tesler goes through similar arguments over at the Monkey Cage. Our view more or less the consensus among political scientists — contrary, as he points out, to the “Wag the Dog” assumptions in the popular culture about the popularity of war.

 

The basic argument?

 

In the short run, not all foreign confrontations produce a rally effect (an upward spike in the president’s approval ratings). The key variable turns out to be whether out-party elites support or oppose the president’s actions. So far Democrats, while condemning Soleimani as a terrorist mastermind responsible for the deaths of thousands of Americans in Iraq and elsewhere, haven’t been praising Trump’s actions. And Trump hasn’t sought their support; not only did he refrain from notifying Congress in advance, but within hours of the drone attack that killed Soleimani in Baghdad on Friday, he was already using it to distinguish Republicans from Democrats, going so far as to retweet a Republican activist who slurred Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer. In other words, while we can never be certain about the outcome, Trump is doing exactly the opposite of what would be needed to get a short-term burst of support.

 

But rally effects are short-term, anyway. And so are the public opinion gains if the policy goes well, because voters have extremely short memories. The classic example is the fate of President George H.W. Bush after the first Gulf War. The conflict was perceived as a tremendous victory with low costs, and voters promptly forgot about it as soon as it was no longer dominating the news. Just two years after it ended with Bush’s popularity soaring, he lost the 1992 election. A quieter victory now — say, if Iran’s threat to retaliate fizzles out and killing Soleimani actually does reduce Iranian adventurism — would almost certainly yield no significant public opinion gains because those successes wouldn’t dominate the news. (To be fair: Quiet setbacks, even important ones, probably wouldn’t harm Trump’s popularity because, again, most people wouldn’t notice them).

 

If, however, the result of Trump’s actions is a longer military conflict, then he’s really in trouble. The two things that have been found to hurt presidential approval ratings, and therefore re-election chances, are bad economic news and mounting U.S. casualties in a foreign conflict. Trump is risking both.

 

Could this analysis be wrong? Sure. Any number of things could have changed so that previous findings by political scientists might no longer apply. Or perhaps something about Trump, or about this particular international crisis, is different in some relevant way. That’s always possible — but partisan polarization would presumably make it less likely, not more likely, to get significant public opinion effects from events of any kind.

 

None of this is about whether Trump’s actions are good policy or bad. Policy failures (such as the taking of hostages by Iran in 1979) can produce a rally effect for a president; policy successes, such as the ones that George H.W. Bush had during his presidency, can have no effect at all or only spark only short-term changes. And in the long run, policy successes can be politically useful for presidents even if they have no direct effect on public opinion. Not to mention that policy success is good for the nation.

 

But if all Trump was interested in is improving the chances of his own re-election? Then this confrontation with Iran is all downside risk, with little chance of any reward.

[y66]

More from Matt Yglesias on the state of the economy and how this affects the Dems campaign strategy:

 

Many on the left hoped that the silver lining of the prolonged slump since the Great Recession of 2008 would be to discredit capitalism and build momentum for drastic change. Only the youngest voters have stayed wedded to this idea, with much of the broader electorate holding a fairly positive view of the status quo: 76 percent of voters rate economic conditions as either “very good” or “somewhat good,” according to a CNN poll in late December.

 

For liberals, this sets up a worrisome political dynamic ahead of 2020. Typically, positive attitudes about the economy are good news for incumbent presidents.

 

But one nice thing about a strong labor market is that it creates political space to finally pay attention to the myriad social problems that can’t be solved by a “good economy” alone — things like child care, health care, college costs, and environmental protection — that during, the Obama years, tended to be crowded out by a jobs-first mentality.

 

Good times, in other words, could be the perfect opportunity to finally tackle the many long-lingering problems for which progressives actually have solutions and about which conservatives would rather not talk.

 

For years, there was a mostly true narrative that despite positive GDP growth, actual good economic news was largely limited to stock prices and corporate profits. More recently, however, the corner has turned.

 

The Bloomberg Consumer Comfort Index shows a high degree of optimism about the future of the economy. A Gallup poll found that 65 percent of adults think it’s a good time to find a quality job, and 55 percent rate economic conditions as either good or excellent. Fifty-six percent of Americans rate their personal financial situation as good or excellent, 66 percent say they have enough wealth and income to live comfortably, and 57 percent say their personal financial situation is improving.

 

Corporate profits, meanwhile, remain high but have actually been falling as a share of the economy since 2012.

 

At the same time, a low unemployment rate plus higher minimum wages in many states mean that pay is rising — especially for workers at the bottom end.

 

At the same time, according to voters, “the economy” no longer rates among the top four problems facing the nation.

 

That doesn’t change the fact that macroeconomic management remains, substantively speaking, one of the government’s most important tasks. But the mission for the next administration won’t be to heal a broken labor market, but to take advantage of a sound one to create huge benefits.

 

One nice thing about low unemployment is that it tends to lead to wage increases.

 

Employers, of course, don’t like to raise wages when they can get away with it. But in the context of a strong labor market, that stinginess brings its own benefits, since the only way to get away with avoiding big wage increases is to take a risk on workers who might otherwise be locked out. Companies have suddenly found themselves more open to hiring ex-convicts, for example, which is not only good for a very vulnerable population but also makes it much less likely that ex-offenders will end up committing new crimes. Similarly, people in recovery from drug and alcohol addiction aren’t normally an employer’s first choice of job applicants. But beggars can’t be choosers, and a strong labor market is a great chance for people who need of a second chance to get one.

 

A related issue is racial discrimination. For as long as we have records, the black unemployment rate has always been higher than the white unemployment rate. But the racial unemployment gap, which surged during the Great Recession, has been steadily narrowing ever since. Discrimination becomes more costly during periods of full employment, and continued strength in the labor market will continue to whittle away at this and other similar gaps.

 

Last, but by no means least, a strong labor market is the optimal time for labor militancy.

 

The threat of a strike is much more potent at a time when customers are plentiful but potential replacement workers are scarce. And periods in which it’s relatively easy for an experienced worker to get a new job with a new company are typically periods in which it’s hard for employers to intimidate workers out of organizing. Indeed, as Polish economist Michael Kalecki predicted way back in 1943, this is one reason why business interests somewhat counterintuitively fail to advocate for robust full employment policies. An actual recession is bad for almost everyone — but a healthy chunk of the population out of work makes for a decent disciplinary tool, and it keeps the political agenda occupied with things like the need to fix the mythical “skills gap” rather than with worker demands for a bigger piece of the pie.

 

Meanwhile, a reduced public obsession with the need to address short-term economic problems opens up more space to address the many longstanding problems that can’t be cured by a strong economy.

 

Even as the labor market has gotten steadily healthier in recent years, the American birth rate continues to fall from its recession-era highs.

 

Women tell pollsters that’s not because the number of kids they’d ideally like to have has fallen. Instead, the No. 1 most-cited reason is the high cost of child care. Child care doesn’t get more affordable just because the unemployment rate is low. If anything, it’s the opposite — child care is extremely labor-intensive, and the prospects for introducing labor-saving technology into the mix look bad. To make child care broadly affordable would require government action; it’s just not going to happen in a free market, which doesn’t magically allocate extra income to people who have young kids.

 

More broadly, America’s sky-high child poverty rate compared with peer countries is entirely attributable to our failure to enact a child allowance policy. A better labor market helps marginally, but it doesn’t address the fundamental issue that a new baby increases financial needs while also making it harder to work long hours.

 

By the same token, getting sick is expensive, and simultaneously, often leads to income loss. Absent a strong government role, there’s no way to ensure that care and other needed resources are there for those who need it most.

 

Last, but by no means least, there’s the environment. An unregulated economy generates a lot of pollution, and nothing about strong economic growth changes that. On the contrary, what happens is the long-term negative impacts of the pollution end up outweighing the short-term benefit of letting businesses operate unimpeded. Moving the ball forward on everything from climate change to lead cleanup to air pollution requires persuading voters to make the opposite calculation: that the economy is doing well enough to prioritize long-term concerns.

 

These are all policy areas in which progressives want to act regardless of the current state of the economy. But the mass public is more likely to give these ideas a hearing when there’s no real worry of a short-term economic emergency. And conservatives really have nothing to say about any of them.

 

The administration of President Donald Trump is steadily pursuing a policy agenda aimed at stripping as many people as possible of their health insurance, but the president never talks about it.

 

By the same token, his reelection campaign claims “we have the cleanest air on record” when, in fact, air quality has been declining under Trump, and his administration is working on a bunch of regulatory rollbacks that will make air pollution even worse. Meanwhile, Trump’s only child care proposal has been the idea of creating a one-off grant program designed to give states extra money if they agreed to lower quality standards for child care settings.

 

Progressives have ideas about how to boost economic growth, but conservatives have their own clearly articulated vision, one centered on tax cuts and business-friendly regulation. By contrast, when it comes to other social concerns that transcend the short-term state of the economy, progressives have a set of proposals and, well, conservatives have basically nothing. The strong economy is, itself, an asset for Trump during his reelection bid. But the recovery he’s presiding over plainly began under former President Barack Obama, and all Trump has really done is avoid rocking the boat too much. Meanwhile, growth itself is raising the salience of a whole range of other topics on which conservatives have essentially nothing to say.

 

Democrats’ best path forward isn’t in denying that economic progress has been made, but in emphasizing the extent to which it’s absurd that a rich and stable country like ours is also home to sky-high child poverty, middle-class families who can’t afford day care for their kids, and worsening air quality. Low unemployment is great, but it should be the start of good social policy — not the end.

[y66]

From Michelle Goldberg at NYT:

 

There are no more adults in the room.

 

After three harrowing years, we’ve reached the point many of us feared from the moment Donald Trump was elected. His decision to kill Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani, Iran’s second most important official, made at Mar-a-Lago with little discernible deliberation, has brought the United States to the brink of a devastating new conflict in the Middle East.

 

We don’t yet know how Iran will retaliate, or whether all-out war will be averted. But already, NATO has suspended its mission training Iraqi forces to fight ISIS. Iraq’s Parliament has voted to expel American troops — a longtime Iranian objective. (On Monday, U.S. forces sent a letter saying they were withdrawing from Iraq in response, only to then claim that it was a draft released in error.) On Sunday, Iran said it will no longer be bound by the remaining restrictions on its nuclear program in the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the deal that Trump abandoned in 2018. Trump has been threatening to commit war crimes by destroying Iran’s cultural sites and tried to use Twitter to notify Congress of his intention to respond to any Iranian reprisals with military escalation.

 

The administration has said that the killing of Suleimani was justified by an imminent threat to American lives, but there is no reason to believe this. One skeptical American official told The New York Times that the new intelligence indicated nothing but “a normal Monday in the Middle East,” and Democrats briefed on it were unconvinced by the administration’s case. The Washington Post reported that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo — who last year agreed with a Christian Broadcasting Network interviewer that God might have sent Trump to save Israel from the “Iranian menace” — has been pushing for a hit on Suleimani for months.

 

Rather than self-defense, the Suleimani killing seems like the dreadful result of several intersecting dynamics. There’s the influence of rapture-mad Iran hawks like Pompeo and Vice President Mike Pence. Defense officials who might have stood up to Trump have all left the administration. According to Peter Bergen’s book “Trump and His Generals,” James Mattis, Trump’s former secretary of defense, instructed his subordinates not to provide the president with options for a military showdown with Iran. But with Mattis gone, military officials, The Times reported, presented Trump with the possibility of killing Suleimani as the “most extreme” option on a menu of choices, and were “flabbergasted” when he picked it.

 

Trump likely had mixed motives. He was reportedly upset over TV images of militia supporters storming the American Embassy in Iraq. According to The Post, he also was frustrated by “negative coverage” of his decision last year to order and then call off strikes on Iran.

 

Beyond that, Trump, now impeached and facing trial in the Senate, has laid out his rationale over years of tweets. The president is a master of projection, and his accusations against others are a decent guide to how he himself will behave. He told us, over and over again, that he believed Barack Obama would start a war with Iran to “save face” and because his “poll numbers are in a tailspin” and he needed to “get re-elected.” To Trump, a wag-the-dog war with Iran evidently seemed like a natural move for a president in trouble.

 

It’s hard to see how this ends without disaster. Defenders of Trump’s move have suggested that he might have re-established deterrence against Iran, frightening its leadership into restraint. But Vali Nasr, a Middle East scholar at Johns Hopkins University and former senior adviser to Obama’s State Department, tells me that Iran likely believes that it has to re-establish deterrence against the United States.

 

“If they don’t do anything, or if they don’t do enough, then Trump will get comfortable with this kind of behavior, and that worries them,” said Nasr. To Iranians, after all, America is the aggressor, scrapping a nuclear agreement that they were abiding by and imposing a punishing “maximum pressure” sanctions campaign. Just like militarists in the United States, they’re likely to assume that weakness invites attacks. “I don’t think they want to provoke war, but they do want to send a signal that they’re prepared for it,” said Nasr.

 

Even if Iran were to somehow decide not to strike back at the United States, it’s still ramping up its nuclear program, and Trump has obliterated the possibility of a return to negotiations. “His maximum pressure policy has failed,” Nasr said of Trump. “He has only produced a more dangerous Iran.”

 

Meanwhile, ISIS benefits from the breach between Iraq and America. “ISIS suicide and vehicle bombings have nearly stopped entirely,” said Brett McGurk, who until 2018 was special presidential envoy to the coalition fighting ISIS. “Only a few years ago, there were 50 per month, killing scores of Iraqis. That’s because of what we have done and continue to do. These networks will regenerate rapidly if we are forced to leave, and they will again turn their attention on the West.”

 

Unlike with North Korea, it’s difficult to imagine any photo op or exchange of love letters defusing the crisis the president has created. Most of this country has never accepted Trump, but over the past three years, many have gotten used to him, lulled into uneasy complacency by an establishment that has too often failed to treat him as a walking national emergency. Now the nightmare phase of the Trump presidency is here. The biggest surprise is that it took so long.

[y66]

From Gideon Rachman at FT:

 

“Ladies and gentlemen, we got him”: I can still remember the exultant tone of Paul Bremer, the American governor of post-invasion Iraq, as he announced the capture of Saddam Hussein. Mr Bremer’s exhilaration was understandable. But it also pointed to a persistent fallacy that has undermined US foreign policy for decades. You could call it the “Dr Evil syndrome”.

 

This is the idea, popular in Hollywood, that killing or capturing a “bad guy” is the key to solving a complex foreign policy problem. It did not work out like that with Saddam. And it is unlikely that the Dr Evil theory will fare any better after the killing last week of Qassem Soleimani, Iran’s most feared military commander.

 

Many of the “bad guys” eliminated by the US over the years were genuinely evil. Those successfully targeted have included not just Saddam and Soleimani, but also Osama bin Laden, the head of al-Qaeda, and Muammer Gaddafi, the tyrannical leader of Libya.

 

It is emotionally cathartic for the US to finally catch up with an old enemy, like bin Laden. Even Soleimani, who the vast majority of Americans had never heard of, could be made a proxy for all the slights and setbacks that the US has suffered at the hands of Iran since the Islamic revolution of 1979.

 

But the record suggests that taking out a famous bad guy almost never yields lasting gains in US security or influence, which are the usual measures of foreign-policy success. That is partly because Dr Evils generally emerge in deeply dysfunctional countries. Removing them does not remove the social and political pathologies that produce these people in the first place. In fact, it may, for a while, make those problems worse.

 

In 2003, President George W Bush suggested that the capture of Saddam would be “crucial to the rise of a free Iraq”. But Iraq did not turn into a stable, pro-western democracy. Instead it remained a fractured, violent country which fell increasingly under the sway of Iran.

 

Gaddafi was another longstanding foe of America, whose compound was bombed by the US in 1986, during the Reagan years. The US and its allies backed an uprising against him in 2011, and the colonel was killed by his Libyan adversaries. But, in the ensuing years, Libya has descended into anarchy and become a base for people traffickers and radical Islamists.

 

After the 9/11 attacks, it became a psychological and political necessity for the US eventually to catch up with bin Laden. His death dealt a further blow to an already weakened al-Qaeda. But Islamist militancy and terrorism resurfaced in new forms — in particular, through the rise of Isis in Iraq and Syria. In a reminder of the complexity of the real world, as opposed to the Hollywood version of it, Soleimani — the Iranian commander the Americans have just killed — played an important role in repressing Isis.

 

The assassination of Soleimani will not fix America’s problem with Iran, any more than executing Saddam fixed the problem with Iraq. John Bolton, Donald Trump’s erstwhile national security adviser, is tweeting hopefully about the possibility of “regime change” in Iran. But even if that happens (and most experts seem doubtful that it will), the experience of Iraq and Libya does not suggest that the US will necessarily like the aftermath.

 

Assuming the Iranian regime holds on to power, it may well become an even more dangerous adversary for the US. The Iranians now have both the opportunity and the motive to go after American targets in the region. The regime could also go all out to develop nuclear weapons. Mr Trump could find himself sucked into another of those “endless wars” in the Middle East that he has promised to end.

 

The malign consequences of the killing of Soleimani could extend well beyond the Middle East — by encouraging other countries to follow America’s example. Assassinations as a tool of foreign policy were made illegal by the US in the 1970s, after a Congressional inquiry into some of the murkier actions of the CIA during the cold war.

 

Both US and international law place severe restrictions on political assassination, which is why the Trump administration insists that strikes such as those aimed at Soleimani, and before him Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, a leader of Isis, are acts of self-defence aimed at terrorists. But the definition of “terrorism” may now be flexible enough to tempt both Russia and China, should they wish to emulate America by eliminating foreign enemies with drone strikes.

 

The decision to disavow assassination as a tool of US foreign policy was not made solely on moral grounds. American officials had also noticed that the tactic was often ineffective and counter-productive.

 

The strategy that did eventually allow the US to prevail in the cold war demanded patience, restraint and a willingness to avoid reaching for quick, violent fixes. It was laid out in 1947 by George Kennan, the original “wise man” of US foreign policy. He recommended the “long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies”.

 

Faced with Iran’s much less threatening expansive tendencies, America should once again have chosen patience and vigilance. Instead, it has fallen once again for the Dr Evil fallacy, with dangerous consequences for the Middle East and the wider world.

From an interview with George Kennan in 2002:

 

Anyone who has ever studied the history of American diplomacy, especially military diplomacy, knows that you might start in a war with certain things on your mind as a purpose of what you are doing, but in the end, you found yourself fighting for entirely different things that you had never thought of before … In other words, war has a momentum of its own and it carries you away from all thoughtful intentions when you get into it. Today, if we went into Iraq, like the president would like us to do, you know where you begin. You never know where you are going to end.

[cherdano]

WP headline:

White House stumbles in initial public response to Soleimani’s killing

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/amid-confusion-and-contradictions-trump-white-house-stumbles-in-initial-public-response-to-soleimanis-killing/2020/01/07/61c9242e-3174-11ea-a053-dc6d944ba776_story.html

 

That seems a little harsh. After all, the US government couldn't possibly have been prepared for a sudden unexpected development such as the US government deciding to strike an Iranian government official out of the blue. Every government would stumble in the face of such a shock!

[y66]

Geraldine Brooks, who covered the Middle East for the Wall Street Journal from 1987 to 1995, reminds us that Suleimeni is not the only one who harmed civilians and that assassination is not a substitute for diplomacy and coherent foreign policy:

 

It was a hot day in June, 30 years ago. I was sweating in a chador, a speck in the black-clad throng of mourners pouring through Tehran for the funeral of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. As the keening crowd surged dangerously toward the grave site, I was lifted off my feet, lost in a heaving mass of humanity.

 

Then, I was a Middle East correspondent for The Wall Street Journal. My job was to understand and explain why what may have been the largest crowd of mourners ever assembled wept hysterically for a man my readers considered monstrous.

 

Today, three decades of diplomatic failure later, I watch from afar on cable news as a similar crowd in Iran, this time a deadly one, mourns Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani. I’m not a journalist anymore, so I’m reduced to groaning at the TV when commentators don’t help us understand what’s going on, but instead confound our understanding by providing incorrect information.

 

Watching CNN, I howl in frustration when a reporter states that in July 1988 the United States Navy warship Vincennes “accidentally” shot down Iran Air 655, a civilian passenger plane, and that nine months later, General Suleimani arranged the pipe-bombing in Washington of a vehicle driven by the wife of the Vincennes’s commander, Capt. William C. Rogers III. (She survived the blast.)

 

The CNN reporter implies that this demonstrates how volatile and dangerous General Suleimani was. But the F.B.I. was unable to establish that the bombing of the Rogers vehicle was an act of Iranian terrorism; the case remains open. And the attack on Iran Air 655 by the Vincennes wasn’t, in any meaningful sense, accidental — and it killed 290 people, 66 of them children.

 

In 1988 I traveled to Iran for the funerals of those 290 civilians. Their bodies had been fished from the water of the Persian Gulf and brought home for burial. My editor called me as I left for Tehran, asking me to consider the possibility that Iran shot down the plane itself, since she thought it odd that the recovered bodies were unclothed. “Did they put naked corpses in that plane before they shot it down?” she asked.

 

She could be forgiven for not knowing the relevant physics: Clothing would be torn from the passenger’s bodies as the exploding plane plummeted from the sky into the sea. It was harder to forgive her cultural unawareness: A state as obsessed with modesty as Iran was — to the extent of covering every hair on a woman’s head and every male kneecap — would never consider undressing bodies before blowing them up.

 

Ignorance surrounded — and still surrounds — that tragedy. In the immediate aftermath of the downing of Iran Air 655, the United States military’s prevarications came thick and fast: The plane wasn’t in the civilian air corridor. (It was.) It didn’t have its transponder turned on. (It did.) It was descending toward the Vincennes. (It wasn’t.)

 

The truth gradually came out in the course of the Navy’s own inquiries and in later investigative reports that revealed a pattern of reckless aggression by the Vincennes captain, beginning a month earlier. David Carlson, the commanding officer of the frigate Sides, which was also deployed then in the gulf, called the downing of the Iranian airliner “the horrifying climax” of that aggressiveness. Just before firing at the plane, Captain Rogers had provoked Iranian gunboats and then followed them into Iran’s territorial waters.

 

Yet the United States later decorated Captain Rogers “for exceptionally meritorious conduct” as commander of the Vincennes during that time. The citation made no mention of the downing of Iran Air 655. How would Americans feel if Iran pinned a medal on a man who killed 290 American civilians?

 

General Suleimani has American blood on his hands, as we are reminded repeatedly, not only by President Trump but also by Democratic presidential candidates. This is true. But is it wrong to remind ourselves of the Iranian blood we have on ours?

 

On other reporting trips to Iran, I visited Khorramshahr, a city that had been reduced to rubble by a barrage of shelling by Saddam Hussein, as well as the civilian neighborhoods of Tehran, which had endured a similar barrage. At that time Mr. Hussein was, as the United States ambassador in Baghdad told me, “a guy we can work with.” We and Israel secretly provided him with information on how best to target his missile strikes. There, too, civilian Iranian blood was on our hands.

 

Having witnessed that destruction, I don’t find it hard to understand why Iran seeks to build up its missile capability. We would, if in its position. Israel’s supporters often note that Israel’s military aggression can be excused because it lives in “a bad neighborhood” — and indeed, it does. But we characterize Iran as “meddling” in Iraq, forgetting or oblivious to the fact that not long ago Iraq posed an existential threat to Iran, which the United States abetted.

 

General Suleimani killed Americans and, we are told, had plans to kill more. He was a military commander. Military commanders have plans to kill their enemies. And the United States is Iran’s enemy, reneging on the nuclear agreement and choking its economy, impoverishing and immiserating civilians who have nothing to do with, and no say in, their government’s policy.

 

Is Iran a brutal, murderous, repressive regime that tramples the rights of women and minorities? No doubt. But so is Saudi Arabia, and we have managed to work with that regime. Iran is just as critical to the long-term stability of the region.

 

Forty years is a long time for the United States to be without a diplomatic presence in a country, and Iran bears the blame for severing those relations. But the dangerous, disproportionate assassination of General Suleimani may have shut the diplomatic door for many more decades.

[kenberg]

WP headline:

 

https://www.washingt...a776_story.html

 

That seems a little harsh. After all, the US government couldn't possibly have been prepared for a sudden unexpected development such as the US government deciding to strike an Iranian government official out of the blue. Every government would stumble in the face of such a shock!

 

When it becomes difficult to distinguish irony from accurate assessment I think that we are in deep trouble.

[Winstonm]

I'm beginning to see the problem.

 

Daily Beast:

Less than a third of registered American voters are able to correctly point to Iran on an unlabeled world map, a survey has shown.

[kenberg]

I'm beginning to see the problem.

 

Daily Beast:

 

 

If about, but not quite, one in three Americans can find Iran on an un-labeled map I would be pleasantly surprised. I am sure that when I was 20 I could not have, and probably not when I was 30 either. I think Becky can identify all of the countries of South America from an unmarked map and name the capitals. I cannot. I can find Germany, Norway, France etc on an unmarked map but Ukraine? Maybe. I hope my life never depends on it.

 

Quick, what's the capital of Uruguay? I think I do know that one. But when someone was speaking of their trip to Panama City I thought that they had gone to Panama. Naive me.

[y66]

From Jonathan Bernstein at Bloomberg:

 

I had a Twitter discussion awhile ago in which I argued that Utah Senator Mike Lee was one of the three or four most likely Republicans to vote to convict and remove President Donald Trump after a Senate impeachment trial. After Wednesday, I’m even more convinced of it.

 

That’s not to say that Lee is likely to vote to convict. Indeed, it’s very possible that all 53 Republicans will vote to acquit. And I haven’t seen any reporting at all suggesting that Lee is among the handful pushing for witnesses to be called and documents and other evidence to be collected and presented. Nevertheless, I still think that if there are (say) four votes to convict, Lee would probably be one of them.

 

Why Lee? Because he has a history of being concerned with overreach in the presidency and the executive branch. That came out again after senators were briefed on the Iran situation in the aftermath of the U.S. drone strike that killed Iran’s top general, Qassem Soleimani, at the Baghdad airport last Friday. Lee emerged from the secure location and absolutely blasted the briefers to the media, calling it “probably the worst briefing I have seen” on military matters and hitting hard against how “insulting and demeaning” it had been because “one of the messages we received from the briefers was, ‘Do not debate, do not discuss the issue of the appropriateness of further military intervention against Iran,’ and that if you do ‘You will be emboldening Iran.’”

 

This isn’t the first time Lee has dissented. He was one of a handful of Republican senators who voted against Trump on two measures that the president eventually vetoed: One to prevent Trump from transferring funds to pay for his Mexican-border wall, and another over U.S. support of Saudi Arabia and its allies in a proxy war in Yemen.

 

So he’s willing to oppose Trump, including by voting against Trump’s priorities, on issues relating to what he sees as outsized claims of authority by the executive.

 

It doesn’t take a lot of heavy thinking to conclude that a senator upset that a president would ignore the law (in the form of specific congressional spending decisions) over money diverted to the border wall might also be unhappy about a president who refused to send duly authorized military aid to Ukraine. Or that he might find it outrageous or worse if that president refused to cooperate with congressional oversight efforts to determine what happened to the money. In fact, it’s hard to imagine that Lee hasn’t made that connection already. (If he hasn’t, it’s another good reason for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to appoint Republican-turned-independent Representative Justin Amash as one of the impeachment managers). The issues are pretty closely related.

 

And Lee’s electoral situation gives him a fair amount of room. Utah is solidly Republican, but it’s not very Trumpy. He might be joined in voting to convict by Utah’s other Republican senator, Mitt Romney. Lee isn’t up for re-election until 2022, when he certainly doesn’t have to worry about losing a general election because of some Trump die-hards staying home to punish him. He might have reason to fear a challenge to his re-nomination, but on the whole he’s probably about as safe as anyone. And as far as I know, Lee doesn’t have presidential ambitions of his own that could be destroyed by voting against Trump.

 

None of which means that Lee will necessarily back up any unhappiness he feels by actually voting to remove the president. Even if I’m correct that he really does deplore executive-branch overreach and favors standing up for congressional authority, Lee also no doubt has plenty of loyalty to his party and to his constituents, who surely oppose impeachment even if they’re less Trumpy than Republicans elsewhere. In other words, at the very least he will be be squeezed between his principled opposition to presidential abuse of power and his obligations to party and voters.

 

Still, to identify Lee as cross-pressured is to peg him as one of the handful most likely to vote to remove. Most Republican senators are going to think of the impeachment trial as an easy vote for acquittal. They aren’t going to feel pressured at all. (Perhaps they should, but I doubt they will). I don’t know whether Lee will join them, but if so I don’t think he’ll be entirely comfortable.

[barmar]

 

If about, but not quite, one in three Americans can find Iran on an un-labeled map I would be pleasantly surprised. I am sure that when I was 20 I could not have, and probably not when I was 30 either. I think Becky can identify all of the countries of South America from an unmarked map and name the capitals. I cannot. I can find Germany, Norway, France etc on an unmarked map but Ukraine? Maybe. I hope my life never depends on it.

 

Quick, what's the capital of Uruguay? I think I do know that one. But when someone was speaking of their trip to Panama City I thought that they had gone to Panama. Naive me.

I also consider myself reasonably well informed, and I wouldn't be able to label most countries in the Middle East. The exceptions would be the ones directly around Israel, since I learned that geography in Hebrew School when I was a kid.

[Winstonm]

 

If about, but not quite, one in three Americans can find Iran on an un-labeled map I would be pleasantly surprised. I am sure that when I was 20 I could not have, and probably not when I was 30 either. I think Becky can identify all of the countries of South America from an unmarked map and name the capitals. I cannot. I can find Germany, Norway, France etc on an unmarked map but Ukraine? Maybe. I hope my life never depends on it.

 

Quick, what's the capital of Uruguay? I think I do know that one. But when someone was speaking of their trip to Panama City I thought that they had gone to Panama. Naive me.

 

Well, here is the problem as I see it.

 

If someone doesn't know where Iran is located - even close - has no idea of its neighbors, its history, its enemies, its risks, etc., then how can someone make a determination about that country without taking other peoples' word?

 

An example. My own brother - as a reminder, is right wing and a retired U.S. Army Colonel - used to throw around the quote attributed to Iran's ex-president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad where he supposedly declared Israel should be "wiped off the map". I decided to find out for myself what this big "Iran problem" was all about.

 

As it turns out that quote wasn't entirely accurate. Still, what got to me is that when you truly looked into his views, what Ahmandinejad had to say wan't insane at all - in fact, it was quite logical. One of his main contentions was that because Germany was the source of the attempted genocide of the Jews, Germany should have been the country to sacrifice land for an Israeli state. To me, that makes perfect sense. Instead, the Palestinians were compelled to accept a Jewish nation and either incorporate or move. This was unfair to the Palestinians. I agree.

 

Although I disagree with Iran on many things, I do not consider them crazy or illogical. Dangerous? Yes. Unreasonable? No.

 

So, back to my main point - the 1 in 3 voters who can't find Iran on a map. It is not the geography that makes me uneasy but the lack of curiosity and dependence on viewpoints other than their own.

 

Someone is supposed to have once claimed, "You can't cheat an honest man." I would modify that a bit: You may be able to cheat him, but if you target a critical thinker you will have a much harder go of it.

 

It's the same reason I don't automatically agree with John Bolton. He's peddling propaganda to serve his agenda, not trying to establish a basic truth that leads to an informed decision.

[Winstonm]

I'm pretty sure Trump is right that we need to deregulate even more <_< - probably just get rid of...say...the FAA:

 

 

House Transportation Committee Chairman Peter DeFazio, who has been investigating the MAX, said the messages “paint a deeply disturbing picture of the lengths Boeing was apparently willing to go to in order to evade scrutiny from regulators, flight crews, and the flying public, even as its own employees were sounding alarms internally.”

 

He added: “they show a coordinated effort dating back to the earliest days of the 737 MAX program to conceal critical information from regulators and the public.”

[johnu]

Unintended consequences - Assassination of Soleimani probably led to the deaths of 176 people on a flight bound for Ukraine

 

Iran May Have Downed Passenger Plane Killing 176 People, U.S. Officials Say

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson supported the assessment, saying evidence indicates an Iranian surface-to-air missile downed the plane. He added that striking the plane may have been unintentional, and said it was too early to draw conclusions.

The only thing that is sure is that President Impeached will not take any responsibility for starting the chain of events that led to these deaths.

 

In other news, the White House has announced the imminent threat to the US that led to the assassination of Soleimani. Apparently Iran had planned to steal Mount Rushmore and relocate it to Iran. They had secretly bought several moving companies and had lined up hundreds of semi-trucks to drive the sculpture to Iran in the middle of the night when nobody was watching. On a personal note, I have to thank the Manchurian President for saving one of our national treasures.

 

Ooops, this was the top secret information that Democrats couldn't be trusted with, so nobody should discuss this Iranian plot in public or private.

[barmar]

Well, here is the problem as I see it.

 

If someone doesn't know where Iran is located - even close - has no idea of its neighbors, its history, its enemies, its risks, etc., then how can someone make a determination about that country without taking other peoples' word?

I know it's in the Middle East, and I think it borders Iraq, because I remember battles between them. But I couldn't specifically point out which is which on a map.

[johnu]

In other news, the White House has announced the imminent threat to the US that led to the assassination of Soleimani. Apparently Iran had planned to steal Mount Rushmore and relocate it to Iran. They had secretly bought several moving companies and had lined up hundreds of semi-trucks to drive the sculpture to Iran in the middle of the night when nobody was watching. On a personal note, I have to thank the Manchurian President for saving one of our national treasures.

President Impeached is now saying that Iran was planning to steal the Grand Canyon and drop it in the Persian Gulf which would leave a big, dangerous hole in the ground in the US, and cause a tsunami which would inundate US bases in the Arabian Peninsula. I thank Individual-1 for saving thousands of US military lives and saving the Grand Canyon for future generations.

 

Obvious that the Dems in Congress couldn't be trusted not to leak this latest bit of information.

[y66]

From Elaine Luria and Max Rose at NYT:

 

Elaine Luria (@ElaineLuriaVA) serves the 2nd District of Virginia in the United States Congress. She’s a Navy veteran. Max Rose (MaxRose4NY) serves New York’s 11th District in Congress. He’s a veteran of the U.S. Army.

 

The most consequential decision a member of Congress can make is whether to send troops into harm’s way, and it is one we take seriously and personally. We both served in the greater Middle East and saw the impact of these intractable conflicts on our fellow service members and their families. Our military personnel are our nation’s most valuable asset; we must not send them into unnecessary war.

 

We voted against the War Powers Resolution that the House passed this week because it merely restated existing law. It addressed a de-escalated conflict with a symbolic vote that did more to distract than to fix the real challenges we face. If Congress wants to assert its power to declare war, we must take on the hard task of publicly debating a new Authorization for Use of Military Force, the A.U.M.F., as it’s commonly called, as well as congressional appropriations for military operations. That is where decisions of war and peace are made.

 

Qassim Suleimani was a terrorist responsible for the death of hundreds of Americans. Our fellow service members were killed and wounded at his direction, and all intelligence indicates that he was in the process of planning further attacks. President Trump was within his right to order this attack and is now correctly de-escalating the conflict with the clear mandate that we must prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear capability.

 

We are not at war with Iran, and no president can engage in war without congressional approval. But the commander in chief holds the authority and responsibility to target hostile combatants who threaten American forces and civilians. The War Powers Resolution passed by the House this week sends the wrong message to the American people and the world that our nation is heading toward or is currently engaged in war with Iran. Neither are true.

 

While we respect our colleagues who serve our nation and supported this resolution, the debate Congress should have is not whether the president had the authority to carry out the Suleimani killing, but rather how we move forward as a governing body if we must commit forces in future sustained combat operations to protect our nation.

 

It is Congress’s responsibility to act as a check on presidential power — and that includes on matters relating to war. This past week underscored that the United States is operating under outdated laws governing the use of force. We must replace the nearly two-decade-old A.U.M.F.s with a legal framework that empowers the president to act against threats to our nation while constraining him from unilaterally placing us on a path to war. We must also use the power of the purse in stating our military objectives.

 

Our constituents sent us to Congress to do what is right, even when it is difficult. This transcends partisan politics. It’s about changing the way we engage in war and peace for decades to come. Now it is up to Congress to debate an A.U.M.F. that reflects the threats of today and tomorrow, not the forever wars of yesterday.

[y66]

From Sydney Ember at NYT:

 

DES MOINES — Bernie Sanders edged ahead of his Democratic rivals in Iowa, affirming his resurgence less than four weeks before next month’s caucuses, according to a new poll from The Des Moines Register and CNN.

 

The poll showed that Mr. Sanders was the first choice for 20 percent of would-be caucusgoers, an increase of five percentage points from November, when The Register last polled the state. He was followed closely by Elizabeth Warren at 17 percent, Pete Buttigieg at 16 percent and Joseph R. Biden Jr. at 15.

 

The results are the latest sign that Mr. Sanders — lifted by his loyal supporters and an unchanging message — has strong campaign momentum heading into the Feb. 3 Iowa caucuses and has rebounded politically after having a heart attack in October. It is the first time he has led a Register poll this cycle. In 2016, Mr. Sanders battled Hillary Clinton to a virtual tie in Iowa, transforming him into a threat for the Democratic nomination.

 

The poll was less kind to Mr. Buttigieg, who held a dominant lead in the last Register poll, with 25 percent support. That poll also showed Ms. Warren at 16 percent and Mr. Biden at 15 percent.

 

To say the poll was highly anticipated is an understatement. The poll is the first significant survey from Iowa in nearly two months, a drought that has left a murky picture of the Democratic primary race in a state that conducts its first-in-the-nation caucuses. Iowans famously break late, sometimes making their final decision in the weeks and days before the caucuses occur, and every campaign will be scrutinizing the results for signs that their candidate is strengthening — and that their rivals are weakening — heading into the final stretch.

 

The poll numbers are the latest evidence that the race in Iowa remains fluid and winnable for the top four candidates, who have all crisscrossed the state in recent weeks to try to persuade supporters to come out for them on caucus night. Only 40 percent of respondents said their minds were made up, a reflection of the indecision on the ground, where conversations with Iowans often reveal that they still favor multiple candidates.

 

Of paramount importance to many Democrats in Iowa is beating President Trump in the general election in November. But the absence of a clear front-runner, along with no indication that any one candidate will break away from the pack in the remaining weeks, has left many voters unsure where to align their preferences.

 

Amy Klobuchar, who has attracted more interest in recent weeks but has yet to convert that into an increase in actual support, held steady at 6 percent, good for a distant fifth place in the poll. Cory Booker, who is hoping for a lucky break, also remained unchanged at 3 percent, behind the entrepreneur Andrew Yang, who was at 5 percent.

 

The poll of 701 likely Democratic caucusgoers was conducted Jan. 2-8 and has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.7 percentage points.

[y66]

From Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDUnn at NYT:

 

Mr. Kristof and Ms. WuDunn are the authors of “Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope,” from which this essay is adapted.

 

YAMHILL, Ore. — Chaos reigned daily on the No. 6 school bus, with working-class boys and girls flirting and gossiping and dreaming, brimming with mischief, bravado and optimism. Nick rode it every day in the 1970s with neighbors here in rural Oregon, neighbors like Farlan, Zealan, Rogena, Nathan and Keylan Knapp.

 

They were bright, rambunctious, upwardly mobile youngsters whose father had a good job installing pipes. The Knapps were thrilled to have just bought their own home, and everyone oohed and aahed when Farlan received a Ford Mustang for his 16th birthday.

 

Yet today about one-quarter of the children on that No. 6 bus are dead, mostly from drugs, suicide, alcohol or reckless accidents. Of the five Knapp kids who had once been so cheery, Farlan died of liver failure from drink and drugs, Zealan burned to death in a house fire while passed out drunk, Rogena died from hepatitis linked to drug use and Nathan blew himself up cooking meth. Keylan survived partly because he spent 13 years in a state penitentiary.

 

Among other kids on the bus, Mike died from suicide, Steve from the aftermath of a motorcycle accident, Cindy from depression and a heart attack, Jeff from a daredevil car crash, Billy from diabetes in prison, Kevin from obesity-related ailments, Tim from a construction accident, Sue from undetermined causes. And then there’s Chris, who is presumed dead after years of alcoholism and homelessness. At least one more is in prison, and another is homeless.

 

We Americans are locked in political combat and focused on President Trump, but there is a cancer gnawing at the nation that predates Trump and is larger than him. Suicides are at their highest rate since World War II; one child in seven is living with a parent suffering from substance abuse; a baby is born every 15 minutes after prenatal exposure to opioids; America is slipping as a great power.

 

We have deep structural problems that have been a half century in the making, under both political parties, and that are often transmitted from generation to generation. Only in America has life expectancy now fallen three years in a row, for the first time in a century, because of “deaths of despair.”

 

“The meaningfulness of the working-class life seems to have evaporated,” Angus Deaton, the Nobel Prize-winning economist, told us. “The economy just seems to have stopped delivering for these people.” Deaton and the economist Anne Case, who is also his wife, coined the term “deaths of despair” to describe the surge of mortality from alcohol, drugs and suicide.

 

The kids on the No. 6 bus rode into a cataclysm as working-class communities disintegrated across America because of lost jobs, broken families, gloom — and failed policies. The suffering was invisible to affluent Americans, but the consequences are now evident to all: The survivors mostly voted for Trump, some in hopes that he would rescue them, but under him the number of children without health insurance has risen by more than 400,000.

 

The stock market is near record highs, but working-class Americans (often defined as those without college degrees) continue to struggle. If you’re only a high school graduate, or worse, a dropout, work no longer pays. If the federal minimum wage in 1968 had kept up with inflation and productivity, it would now be $22 an hour. Instead, it’s $7.25.

 

We were foreign correspondents together for many years, periodically covering humanitarian crises in distant countries. Then we would return to the Kristof family farm in Yamhill and see a humanitarian crisis unfolding in a community we loved — and a similar unraveling was happening in towns across the country. This was not one town’s problem, but a crisis in the American system.

 

“I’m a capitalist, and even I think capitalism is broken,” says Ray Dalio, the founder of Bridgewater, the world’s largest hedge fund.

 

Even in this presidential campaign, the unraveling of working-class communities receives little attention. There is talk about the middle class, but very little about the working class; we discuss college access but not the one in seven children who don’t graduate from high school. America is like a boat that is half-capsized, but those partying above water seem oblivious.

 

“We have to stop being obsessed over impeachment and start actually digging in and solving the problems that got Donald Trump elected in the first place,” Andrew Yang argued in the last Democratic presidential debate. Whatever you think of Yang as a candidate, on this he is dead right: We have to treat America’s cancer.

 

In some ways, the situation is worsening, because families have imploded under the pressure of drug and alcohol abuse, and children are growing up in desperate circumstances. One of our dearest friends in Yamhill, Clayton Green, a brilliant mechanic who was three years behind Nick in school, died last January, leaving five grandchildren — and all have been removed from their parents by the state for their protection. A local school official sighs that some children are “feral.”

 

More

[Winstonm]

I think Trump is confusing imminent with Imam, which gives imminent threat a whole different meaning.

[kenberg]

From Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDUnn at NYT:

 

Mr. Kristof and Ms. WuDunn are the authors of "Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope," from which this essay is adapted.

 

 

 

 

 

Just a little further down we find:

 

 

Farlan, the oldest of the Knapp children, was in Nick's grade. A talented woodworker, he dreamed of opening a business called "Farlan's Far Out Fantastic Freaky Furniture." But Farlan ended up dropping out of school after the ninth grade.

 

Although he never took high school chemistry, Farlan became a first-rate chemist: He was one of the first people in the Yamhill area to cook meth. For a time he was a successful entrepreneur known for his high quality merchandise. "This is what I was made for," he once announced with quiet pride. But he abused his own drugs and by his 40s was gaunt and frail.

 

In some ways, he was a great dad, for he loved his two daughters, Amber and Andrea, and they idolized him. But theirs was not an optimal upbringing: In one of Amber's baby pictures, there's a plate of cocaine in the background.

 

 

 

The authors present ideas as to why things go wrong. They spend some time talking about this family.

 

But we get "Farlan ended up dropping out of school after the ninth grade." Why? And he went into the drug business. Why?

 

 

They are very dismissive of any notion of personal responsibility. But in a family that they look at closely they repeatedly duck opportunity to examine how the choices were made.

 

 

At one point they say "It would be easy but too simplistic to blame just automation and lost jobs" and I thought great. they will look at how some of the choices were made. Nope, they continue "The problems are also rooted in disastrous policy choices over 50 years."

 

Of course the matter is not solely personal responsibility. I don't know anyone who thinks that it is. But might it play some role?

If a struggling person read this article and took it seriously they might well conclude "Well, the article makes it clear that my choices are not the issue, it's all up to someone else". I really do not think that is a message that we want to send.

Why is it so hard to see that A. People need help and B. People's lives can go better or worse because of some of their own choices. Both are important.

Added:

The article has been bugging me. Here is something from further down in the story.

 

Americans also bought into a misconceived "personal responsibility" narrative that blamed people for being poor. It's true, of course, that personal responsibility matters: People we spoke to often acknowledged engaging in self-destructive behaviors. But when you can predict wretched outcomes based on the ZIP code where a child is born, the problem is not bad choices the infant is making. If we're going to obsess about personal responsibility, let's also have a conversation about social responsibility.

 

Quite a bit in a short space. Notions of personal responsibility are misconceived. People who talk of personal responsibility blame people for being poor. The authors rebut the idea that an infant is responsible for bad choices s/he has made.

 

This is a condescending, arrogant, dismissive, and erroneous, description of views on personal responsibility. I will say a bit about what I mean when I speak of responsibility. Things have gone wrong in my life. When they do, I reflect on errors that I have made, i try to correct them if possible, I try to learn from those errors in the hope of being a little smarter the next time around.

I do not think this approach is misconceived, I think it is realistic. I do not blame people for being poor, although I sometimes think individual decisions are ill-advised. The comment about mistakes made by infants was simply the authors cute, so they hope, way of being dismissive.

 

I can of course simply ignore this article. I don't know the authors, they don't know me, I am happy to leave it that way. But those who wish to win support from the public might give some thought to whether such dismissive gibberish is the best way to go.

 

[y66]

In this conversation from 2017, J.D. Vance, who wrote "Hillbilly Elegy", and William Julius Wilson talk about the role that poverty, family, community, personal responsibility and luck all play in helping or hindering individual chances for escaping entrenched poverty. They agree that personal responsibility is important and they give tremendous credit to family members who helped cultivate this in their own lives and to their good fortune in having such family members. Where they disagree is in how much "structural forces" affect personal responsibility. Wilson believes that personal responsibility and the structural forces within which it operates are "recursively associated". Vance concedes that life is unfair for a lot of poor Americans and maintains that we have to emphasize the role of individual agency in spite of that unfairness and that it's a difficult balancing act. "I may not have struck that balancing act perfectly in the book", he says "but that was the intention".

 

I suspect they would both agree that a kid born into a family where the father cooks meth and cocaine is left lying around the house is facing an uphill battle and that, if they aren't fortunate enough to have someone in a position of responsibility in their lives to help shape their values and their decision making process, the odds that they will make bad decisions and not reflect clearly on their responsibility for making them increase recursively over time, as Wilson notes, until something happens to break the cycle or end it permanently.

 

I suspect they would both also agree that the leaders we need are men and women who believe in the principle of equality of life chances, regardless of race, class, gender and family background, and who work hard to increase them.

[y66]

From William Barr, Trump’s Sword and Shield by David Rohde at the New Yorker:

 

In private gatherings, current and former F.B.I. agents and Justice Department officials register exhaustion at Trump’s attacks on the F.B.I. Recent retirees told me that they were surprised by how little they missed working at the Bureau.

 

Some agents have embraced Wray’s admonition to do their work and ignore the political brawl around them. After two and a half years on the job, Wray, a low-key former prosecutor and corporate lawyer, has inspired loyalty for handling a difficult situation gracefully. The Bureau, like the country, is deeply divided; even some agents who find Trump personally distasteful say that they support his policies. Comey was a popular director, but agents complain that his calls for people to vote against Trump play into conspiracy theories about the Bureau. The clearest sentiment is disdain for the political class. Last winter, during the longest government shutdown in U.S. history, the Bureau’s thirteen thousand agents and twenty thousand support staffers struggled to pay their bills. After employees walked into supervisors’ offices in tears, agents set up impromptu food banks to help colleagues. Trump caused the shutdown by demanding that Congress fund his border wall with Mexico, but many agents argued that politicians on both sides were responsible. “They didn’t do their job,” Tom O’Connor, a retired F.B.I. agent, told me.

 

The political combat of the Trump era was breeding apathy and disgust. F.B.I. and Justice Department officials said that if Trump was reëlected there would be an exodus of employees. Some retired agents fear that the institution will not survive another four years.

 

Stephen Gillers suggested that Trump’s attacks were part of a drive for increased power. “One way that Trump seeks to maximize control is minimizing the disclosure of information and undermining the credibility of information,” he said. “The Congress needs information to do its job, and the President has frozen it out—especially in the impeachment investigation. Another check is the media, and the President’s use of the term ‘fake news’ can cause people to lose faith in the media. What remains are the courts, which are slow and cumbersome.”

 

Donald Ayer, the former Bush Administration Deputy Attorney General, warned that Barr’s interpretations of executive power could be validated. “The ultimate question is what happens when these reach the Supreme Court, which has two Trump appointees,” he said. “There is a real danger that he succeeds.” Some legal analysts believe that Barr is overplaying his hand. Benjamin Wittes, of Lawfare, predicted that the Supreme Court would reject Barr’s extreme positions, creating precedents that ultimately reduce the power of the Presidency. “The idea that the President gets to assert executive privilege over material that has already been made public is laughable,” Wittes told me. “I think they are very likely to lose a lot of this.”

 

Chuck Cooper, the conservative litigator, disagreed. He said that Barr’s tenure represented the achievement of the legal project launched during the Reagan Administration. “He is building and extending on a foundation,” Cooper said. “It was popularized and very robustly advanced by the Meese Justice Department.” Last October, in the Oval Office, Trump awarded Meese the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the country’s highest civilian honor. Barr attended, and Meese thanked him for carrying on his legacy: “You’ve risen to continue the string of great Attorneys General in this country.”

 

As Barr insists on expanded Presidential power, Republican voters are starting to agree. According to the Pew Center, forty-three per cent of Republicans believe that “presidents could operate more effectively if they did not have to worry so much about Congress and the courts.” That number has increased from fourteen per cent when Trump took office. A House G.O.P. report about Ukraine endorsed his singular authority; slightly misquoting John Marshall, it argued that Trump was, “constitutionally, the ‘nation’s sole organ of foreign affairs,’ ” and thus had unlimited latitude in his dealings with Ukraine.

 

Ayer fears that Barr has combined a Reagan-era drive to dismantle government with a Trump-era drive to politicize it. As the White House succeeds in holding off congressional attempts at removing Trump from office, Barr is winning his long war on the power of the legislative branch. In the 2020 campaign, Trump will argue that he alone can protect the country from the dangers posed by the left, immigrants, and other enemies. And Barr’s vision of Presidential power will be the Party’s mainstream position. “Barr sought out the opportunity to be Donald Trump’s Attorney General,” Ayer said. “This, I believe, was his opportunity—the opportunity of a lifetime—to make major progress on advancing his vision of an all-powerful Chief Executive.”

[Winstonm]

Impeachment by mime.

 

https://www.rollcall.com/news/congress/impeachment-trial-security-crackdown-will-limit-capitol-press-access

The Senate sergeant-at-arms and Capitol Police are launching an unprecedented crackdown on the Capitol press corps for the impeachment trial of President Donald Trump, following a standoff between the Capitol’s chief security officials, Senate Rules Chairman Roy Blunt and the standing committees of correspondents.

 

Capitol Police Chief Steven A. Sund and Senate Sergeant-at-Arms Michael C. Stenger will enact a plan that intends to protect senators and the chamber, but it also suggests that credentialed reporters and photographers whom senators interact with on a daily basis are considered a threat.